If you’re anything like me, odds are that you don’t just have one computer or device on which you capture those important notes or eureka moments throughout your day. Between smartphones and work and home computers, it can be a pain trying to track down important notes you’ve jotted down at one point or another. Thankfully, I recently ran across Evernote, a fantastic application that not only allows you to capture voice, text, and picture notes, but also keeps them all synchronized through a streamlined web interface.
Web Interface
If you head over to http://www.evernote.com, the signup process is pretty straightforward asking you for your name, username, email address, and password. At this point you’ll be able to login to your web account to view your notes. They get organized into notebooks and subsequently notes that can be created either via text or attachments such as mp3 audio, image, or pdf files.
Also of note (heh) is that you can tag your various notes to make them more searchable later on. Personally I use different notebooks for work, GeeksPodcast, personal projects and the like and don’t use tags very often, but I can see how they’d be useful. Besides tags for searchability, you’re also provided a specific email address that you can shoot notes to so they’re automatically added to your notebooks.
Desktop Apps and Mobile Device Support
While the web interface is nice, I find myself scarcely using it in favor of the Mac and iPhone apps. Both of which offer built-in support for the iSight and iPhone camera, respectively as well as audio recording through the built in mics on both. The app is also available for Windows as well as the iPod Touch, though the iPod Touch version will obviously lack voice recording and camera functionality. These apps have proven to be fast and stable so far and also will actively and automatically sync your notes with all of your other devices on which Evernote is installed.
Blackberry users should also be satisfied as Evernote recently added support for the uber-popular smartphone.
Upgrading to Premium
While Evernote can function fine as a free service for many of us, power users may find it necessary to upgrade to Premium status. As far as I can tell, predominantly this removes ads from the site and desktop applications and also removes the cap on uploads. As a free user you are only privy to 40MB of storage per month. While the power users among you will find this useful, I’ve found that even uploading multiple images each month I’ve scarcely hit 10% of that monthly allowance and barely notice the ads in the free version.
In the end, if you’re looking for a great tool to keep your digital life updated across all the devices you use, Evernote is more than worth a look.
Follow Us!